How training will help keep your organization at the forefront of virtual care
Training is at the heart of any effective virtual care solution. Everyone in the industry is learning new ways of doing things while maintaining a focus on the health and satisfaction of patients. So it’s not an overstatement to say that quality training with all of these new capabilities can mean the difference between success and failure in the healthcare business.
Here are the five tips for best practices in Virtual Care training to ensure customer success.
1. Be Proactive About Supporting Continuous Professional Development
First and foremost, it’s important to increase the level of comfort people have with the technology. No matter what your level of expertise is in your job and regardless of your educational background, learning new software is uncomfortable for most. Knowing that change is hard to embrace, I stress the need to allow people to get familiar with their new virtual care tools, work flows, and processes.
2. Be Hands-On in Providing Staff Adequate Time to Achieve Mastery
Providing hands-on training in a low-stakes environment is critical to the success of virtual care. Staff need to perform the tasks they’ll be doing in their day-to-day work. For example, those who are involved in scheduling patient visits need hands-on time to practice scheduling, rescheduling and canceling visits with the online tools. This gives them a chance to work on their skills with the training facilitator right by their side to guide them and answer questions as they arise
Equipping providers with the knowledge and resources they need to master the use of their virtual care tools is imperative for smooth patient interactions.
Imagine how quickly a provider-patient relationship could sour if the provider is visibly struggling to use the tools during a visit!
Providers should practice managing virtual waiting rooms and sending prescriptions from their virtual care platform. They also need to train to make the most of virtual visits, by communicating clearly and asking questions that move the visit along. This is important given that self-reporting from patients is the primary source of information providers use in virtual visits.
3. Place Your Staff in Your Patient-Customer's Shoes
Training sessions offer an overview of the patient experience so providers and their support staff can get a first-hand look at what the patient is seeing and doing during each stage of the virtual visit. This 360° view can help in a range of different ways.
First, it can help to assuage any concerns around the virtual visit experience and whether it will be easy enough for their patients. This knowledge also enables medical staff to answer patient questions about virtual visits and, more importantly, know when it is appropriate to schedule this type of care modality. Finally, viewing the virtual care experience from multiple angles provides greater insight into how a health system’s internal processes might need to be adjusted to support the integration of virtual care into daily routines.
4. Drive Continuous Improvement By Culling Analytic Insights from User Behaviors
Consistent monitoring and evaluation of a virtual care program are critical to building proficiency and that means health care organizations must collect virtual Care performance data.
Your telehealth solution should have sophisticated data and reporting features and the platform delivers lots of data. These include user satisfaction ratings, the number of virtual care visits being performed within a given timeframe, revenue generated from virtual visits, the number of canceled visits, “super-users” among the providers, and more. Data is crucial to driving continuous improvement in Virtual Care programs.
5. Support On-Going Training Initiatives to Stay Ahead of the Curve
Training is not a one-and-done! It should be a sustained effort that focuses on delivering the right training content at the right time. Telehealth is constantly evolving, and new features and functionality are added to platforms to keep up, so continuous training is also important.
Your virtual care platform should incorporate in-product education features. This enables the platform to deliver important tips, guides, and answers to questions directly and is available when users need it. This also means a provider can work uninterrupted and focus on what matters most: patient care. In-platform education is especially beneficial in large healthcare organizations where not every staff member is available to join face-to-face training.
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